Allpeers bundles P2P extension with Firefox

The folks at Allpeers seem to be pretty excited about the new version 0.60 of their Firefox file sharing extension - so excited in fact that they just broke their own news embargo with a posting on their blog. The reason for all this adrenaline: Allpeers 0.60 will be available as a Mozilla-sanctioned Firefox bundle, meaning that users that are new to Firefox and Allpeers only have to install one application to share files with their friends.

The official Allpeers press release quotes CEO Cedric Maloux saying:
"Approximately 10% of new AllPeers users download Firefox in order to install our application. The popularity of our application's features has helped AllPeers achieve an organic growth rate of one new user every two minutes, and we expect this rate to accelerate considerably with the added ease of installation afforded by the new bundle."

Mind you, this doesn't mean that every Firefox download will now have Allpeers built in. Instead, Alleers will distribute a special version of Firefox on their own site with the blessing of the Mozilla foundation - an arrangement that is somewhat similiar to the Google Toolbar-powered Firefox.

Still, it could help Firefox to find some new friends by adding a viral factor. From now on it will be your friends who nag you to install the browser, and not just some blogging CSS fetishists. It remains to be seen if that is enough to make Allpeers the "Firefox killer app" that Techcrunch predicted early last year.